Palin Snubs Oprah

Oprah's feeling hurt. I'm not sure how this constitutes news, but leave it to Yahoo, right? Not a site I visit voluntarily, but it's the homepage at work, whaddayagonnado?

I think this is very simple - Sarah Palin has been just absolutely flooded, inundated with offers to speak all over the world. Great - more power to her. Looks like some foreign countries can appreciate people that the left in this country would rather just stomp on.

Apparently, one of these offers to speak came from none other than the blowhard herself, Oprah Winfrey. After she said during the campaign, in her sheer terror of the Thrilla from Wasilla, that she absolutely would NOT be having Sarah Palin on her show. Not that I think Palin necessarily would have gone on anyway - she has some class. But Oprah seems to think everyone is standing around slavering and drooling and panting for a seat on her couch. Maybe some people are, but not anyone I want or need to listen to. Palin's got offers all over the globe; I don't think she needs Oprah anyway.

For the record I used to watch Oprah in the very beginning when she went on television. In those days it was mostly a "freak" show - you'd see people like Michael Alig and company, a lot of transsexuals and transvestites, anything that you just didn't see in the course of your everyday life very much but could be made sensationalistic. She went on the liquid diet and one day came out skinny (I knew that one was a bad, bad idea.) When that failed to stick, she did start doing somewhat more serious topics, but by the time 1990 or so rolled around and I was 23 with two babies, I was already sick of her crap. When she started getting heavy on the new-age, mystical nonsense, that was the absolute end of it for me. Anyway, there were lots of others to choose from. There was Mo Gaffney, Gordon Elliot, Sally Jessy, and a bunch of court shows that were a lot better than talk shows. I never watched Oprah again, until I accidentally caught an episode in 2006. My write-up from the time is below. I bet you were dying to know about my television-watching habits!

But the point is, Oprah is not only puzzled, she's hurt and pissed that Sarah Palin hasn't answered her request.

"I said I would be happy to talk to Sarah Palin when the election was over,” Winfrey tells Extra. “I went and tried to talk to Sarah Palin and instead she talked to Greta [Van Susteren]. She talked to Matt [Lauer]. She talked to Larry [King]. But she didn't talk to me."

Awwww. Oprah? Take the hint. The lady is just too nice to say "Fuck you." But just as she was thinking it really hard at Katie Couric, so hard she stopped giving answers (because it wasn't a real interview), she's thinking it at you. Be glad she's too nice to tell you what she's thinking, or she might scorch you into silence forever. For that matter, Couric ought to be glad of that too.

Yahoo's take on it?

Do you think Palin is avoiding Oprah because she’s intimidated and knows the host is a staunch Obama supporter?

Yeah, that's it, Yahoo - she's intimidated. What the hell is wrong with these people?

For fun, I figured I'd include my reaction to Oprah's stupid show, the one I've actually watched in the last 16 years or so. Since it's still good, I figured I'd share it with you all.

OPRAH - 2006

She hasn't changed. At all. She's still an idiot with a trash TV show. But now she's an idiot with a trash TV show and a great deal of money, power and clout. Not a good thing.

Anyway it caught my interest because Bill and Melinda Gates were going to be on, and it was a two-parter on the "Crisis in Education." Hey guys! We're the government and we f&^%ed up. These things we call schools aren't educating, the city schools are overcrowded and a cesspool of criminal activity that we use to warehouse future inmates as long as possible. This system doesn't work. (Duh.) SO give us more power and more money. (Wtf?) Let us have the children all year and for longer days. (Wtf?) The Gates were touting their experimental school (calling the current system obsolete, which is true) where they are busy training future MS drones. Yes, I said it. There are no books. Yes, that's what I said. NO BOOKS, no lectures in HTH (High Tech High.) It's all hands-on hive training. It's still better than what the government is dishing up, at least MS produces something that people want. They aren't stealing our hard-earned money to finance their indoctrination.

There are some charter schools called KIPP now, the Knowledge is Power Project. They teach their lessons to grade schoolers in Rap. All the lessons are in rap. Yep. Don't ask me. They keep the kids until like 6 PM every day, mandatory summer school, mandatory weekends, 3 hours of homework a night (more rap?) and teachers on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's Oprah's idea of the next Great Thing. Apparently more is better. If only *everyone* would graduate and go on to college, the World Will Be a Better Place. Again, don't ask me. (As though the colleges teaching what SHOULD have been taught in grammar and middle school are doing the world a favor - hey, they keep 'em off the streets, and that isn't even my words, it's the proponents' own words.)

They interviewed some of the KIPP kids, about ten years old, to ask what their future goals were. "COLLIDGE" they all loudly proclaimed. The guy asked "Why are you thinking about that now? You're all of ten." One boy answered honestly, "That's what they teach us!" Hey, you can't write this stuff. One HTH girl explained that when Gates was trying to divide the larger school into two smaller ones (one his experimental school) she and her friends were active in protests against it. Once again, do NOT ask me. (I'll ask you - pretty stupid to protest against smaller class sizes when you have 38 desks for 45 students right? Right? But they didn't want it anyway.) But now - oh now, oh glory, she WILL go to college to pursue her lifelong *dream*...wait for it...of being a teacher.

If you can drill it into them long enough how wonderful this thing called "education" is (that isn't what it is, just what it's called) many of them really believe it. Enough of them to think that the longer they stay in it the better. And what's better than, after having spent 16 or more years being drilled as such (and knowing less than any high schooler of a century ago) to "Give Something Back"? How do you do that? Why, by entering the school system yourself, this time on the other side of the desk. I've seen this too many times to count - people hailed as successes because after having spent nearly two decades in school (yet somehow still sounding like unintelligent, poorly taught kids) they have now become administrators in the very same system that kept them off the streets. No real desire to go on to learn something beyond this, nothing to actually DO or pursue - just keep more kids off the streets and in the system, so they can perpetuate it later. On confiscatory tax dollars. Yes, it's a better life than a street life, you get an inflated wage from confiscated money dished out in poorly managed systems under charge of the government, and get to keep others in the government system too. Win-win. Right? Right? Or could it just be that this system is in large part responsible for the poor conditions that lead to "dropouts comprising 84% of those incarcerated in penal institutions"? Has anyone considered that one major result is being mistaken for one major cause? (The poor bastards they talked to in jail were just POSITIVE that had they merely graduated from high school - not learned anything, but graduated mind you) they would not now be in jail. Somehow magically they would have had a good job handed to them, one that paid enough to live on and keep them honest. Boy is that an unrealistic dream - but that's what they were taught; they were all in school long enough to learn that lie. Of course maybe some of them would have gone on to be teachers.

Problem is it's so ingrained into the entire population and so huge, I really can't give an answer. The system has to go, but it's not going to. And it's going to perpetuate itself into a worse one than it is now, just as it has been doing for a long time.

Daily groan: Illinois governor - hehe, lovable little scamp! but Bush/Cheney/Rove? ADOLPH HITLER INDICT HIM AND LOCK HIM UP FOREVER!

LOL YOUR HYPOCRITES!